Another ridiculous story just as Clement Mihalescu's, went from 0 to FAANG in 6 months but didn't tell us he was a Maths Major.
This is even more extreme. Yeah this guy is an Art's Major, well he was programming since birth. He had his own C compiler when most people didn't have colored TV. He did it all with diligence and hard work.
Thanks for sharing the story, it was a good read but a total clickbait too.
I still thought there was a valuable learning in how he got his first opportunity. Shows that referrals can make a big difference. Also his willingness to accept a non-standard role (support eng contractor role) also helped.
Agreed though that his existing skills (AP computer science and programming when young) helped him succeed in interviews and the roles themselves
One thing I really liked about your journey is you never gave up, even though almost every time your first attempt didn’t get you what you wanted.
- You went for support engineer instead of SWE to get in.
- You took on a project no senior wanted to in order to get to senior impact
- You were rejected 4 times trying to hit principle engineer. Felt like the feedback could have been taken as they wanted you to go in circles (be senior, no be principle), but you took a step back and gathered the vision of what Amazon was looking for and keep iterating until you crushed their expectations.
I love this story because it’s not “I went to college and cruised to staff engineer in 4 yrs.” (Which is awesome if someone can)… but for many of us, the path is more winding, filled with more iteration, failures, adjustments, until we succeed on the next goal of our journey.
It was awesome reading this! I majored in Religion during undergrad, then spent 4 years doing B2B SaaS sales, quit, did a bootcamp, job searched for 4 months, got a job as a Customer Success Engineer, quit, job searched for 6 months, was accepted to an SWE apprenticeship at Twilio, got laid off, and finally secured my first full SWE job at a super promising startup after 19 months unemployed!
Another ridiculous story just as Clement Mihalescu's, went from 0 to FAANG in 6 months but didn't tell us he was a Maths Major.
This is even more extreme. Yeah this guy is an Art's Major, well he was programming since birth. He had his own C compiler when most people didn't have colored TV. He did it all with diligence and hard work.
Thanks for sharing the story, it was a good read but a total clickbait too.
I still thought there was a valuable learning in how he got his first opportunity. Shows that referrals can make a big difference. Also his willingness to accept a non-standard role (support eng contractor role) also helped.
Agreed though that his existing skills (AP computer science and programming when young) helped him succeed in interviews and the roles themselves
Thanks for sharing Steve (and Ryan).
One thing I really liked about your journey is you never gave up, even though almost every time your first attempt didn’t get you what you wanted.
- You went for support engineer instead of SWE to get in.
- You took on a project no senior wanted to in order to get to senior impact
- You were rejected 4 times trying to hit principle engineer. Felt like the feedback could have been taken as they wanted you to go in circles (be senior, no be principle), but you took a step back and gathered the vision of what Amazon was looking for and keep iterating until you crushed their expectations.
I love this story because it’s not “I went to college and cruised to staff engineer in 4 yrs.” (Which is awesome if someone can)… but for many of us, the path is more winding, filled with more iteration, failures, adjustments, until we succeed on the next goal of our journey.
Agreed, I appreciated how willing Steve was to share about the iterations and what he learned from them. Thanks for reading Caleb :)
It was awesome reading this! I majored in Religion during undergrad, then spent 4 years doing B2B SaaS sales, quit, did a bootcamp, job searched for 4 months, got a job as a Customer Success Engineer, quit, job searched for 6 months, was accepted to an SWE apprenticeship at Twilio, got laid off, and finally secured my first full SWE job at a super promising startup after 19 months unemployed!
Congrats on landing the full time SWE job Cesar! Glad you liked the story